Coin Metrics

What it is

Coin Metrics sells institutional crypto data through one REST API and one websocket: exchange market data (trades, candles, quotes, order books), reference rates and CMBI indexes, datonomy asset classification, network metrics computed off the chains, and Atlas — a blockchain explorer exposed as endpoints rather than as a website. Coin Metrics Studio puts charts and dashboards over the same data for people who would rather not write the query.

Talos bought the company in 2025 and has since folded it into its own data line. The old domain redirects to Talos, the product sits in the Talos nav as "Coin Metrics Products", and the index methodology consultations are now published in Talos's name. The docs and the API hostname are unchanged, so day to day you are still writing against api.coinmetrics.io — but support went with the rest: both routes the product page offers are a Talos mailbox and a Talos service desk.

The buyer is an institution wiring a reference price, a benchmark or a research pipeline into something else. It is not a retail chart site, and there is nothing here you sign up for with a card.

Pricing

There is no published price. The pricing URL redirects to the product overview, whose only call to action is a demo request, so every Pro figure is quoted per contract and cannot be compared against a competitor's published tier.

What is public is the rate-limit table in the API docs, which is the closest thing to a plan sheet. Community allows 10 requests per 6 seconds per IP address at a reduced download speed, with websockets marked N/A. Trial allows 10 requests per 6 seconds per API key at full speed with up to 200 websocket connections; how long a trial lasts is not stated anywhere. Default (PRO) and Download (PRO) both allow 6,000 requests per 20 seconds per key and differ only in download speed. The headers disagree with the table: a key-less call on 26 September 2026 came back labelled x-ratelimit-plan: download with a limit of 6,000 per 20 seconds, where the docs say the header should read community — plan against the documented 10 per 6 seconds, which is the only one of the two the vendor has written down.

The community endpoint needs no key and no account, and the docs do name the licence the data comes under, though only in the link rather than in the sentence: it points at CC BY-NC 4.0. Non-commercial is the operative half — attribution plus no commercial use puts the free tier out of bounds for anything you sell.

Data & coverage

Reference data lists 68 exchanges. That includes DEXes (Uniswap v1 to v4 across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Optimism, Curve, Balancer v2, SushiSwap, Aerodrome, Trader Joe, Velodrome), derivatives venues (CME, Deribit, dYdX, Hyperliquid, BitMEX, Coinbase Derivatives, GFO-X), prediction markets (Kalshi, Polymarket) and venues that no longer exist but whose tape is kept for history (Mt. Gox, FTX, Bittrex, Liquid, Gatecoin). Derivatives go past price into funding rates and predicted funding, open interest, liquidations, contract prices, implied volatility and greeks.

Volume comes in two views, and the second is the reason a careful buyer is here. Reported volume sums every market covered; trusted volume is the same spot calculation restricted to a set of exchanges drawn from the Talos Exchange Scorecard, and so always a subset of reported. The docs are explicit about its limits: the set is point-in-time and "not restated when the constituent list changes", so a step in a long series can be a membership change rather than a market one; trusted metrics exist for assets and pairs but not per exchange; and futures and options have no trusted variant. Why exchange volume numbers disagree sets that rule against the other providers'.

BitMEX now belongs in the last of those groups rather than the second: it ceased trading on 23 September 2026. On 4 October 2026 the community API's catalogue still listed it, with the trades on its XBTUSD and ETHUSD perpetuals ending on 16 September 2026 at 12:00 UTC — history kept, nothing new arriving.

Atlas covers 358 assets and is addressed the way a chain is, not the way a metrics feed is: blocks, transactions, accounts, sub-accounts, balance updates, and balance updates for a single account, with asynchronous jobs for the large pulls. Network metrics on the free tier confirm Bitcoin and Ethereum are read from chain state; Solana's series exist but are Pro-gated, and Base shows up through both Atlas tokens and the Base DEX venues.

Since 8 September 2026 there is a second delivery path that is not the API at all: ten datasets published daily as Apache Parquet in Amazon S3 and as queryable tables in Snowflake — market trades, candles, quotes, order-book snapshots and updates, reference rates and the reference-data catalogs. Coverage there is narrower than the API's: 48 exchanges for trades and candles, 29 for quotes and order-book snapshots, 5 for order-book updates. You read it with the AWS CLI, DuckDB, Spark or plain SQL.

The REST API itself returns json, json_stream or csv. Parquet exists only on the cloud delivery path.

Integrations

There is an official Python client, coinmetrics-api-client, last published on 2 September 2026, and an R client whose last commit on master was in December 2023. The websocket API is Pro-only. There is no MCP server and no webhook delivery — if you want a push, you hold a websocket open, and that means a Pro key.

Limitations

The free tier has no market data in it. Not a reduced set, not a delayed set: ask for any market, spot or derivative, and the API answers Requested markets are not available with supplied credentials. What "free Coin Metrics" means in practice is 32 daily asset metrics and reference rates — network activity, supply, exchange flows, hash rate, market cap — and nothing an exchange reported. If you came for a free trade tape, this is the wrong provider.

Free frequency is daily. Asking for PriceUSD at 1h is refused outright, and the streaming endpoint is refused too. The one exception is odd and worth knowing: the reference rate is served at 1-second frequency on the community tier, but live only — every historical window returns an empty array, including one a week old. You can read the current second for free and you cannot read yesterday's.

The community catalogue counts 6,252 assets, which is a catalogue count and not a promise of coverage: most of those assets carry a price and little else, and the deeper metric sets belong to a much shorter list. Solana's active-address series is the clean example — it exists, it is simply not yours without a contract.

Pricing itself is a limitation. With no published figure you cannot budget, cannot compare and cannot tell whether you are being quoted the same number as the desk next door, and the trial's length is not stated either. Budget for a procurement cycle, not an afternoon.

Alternatives

For reference rates and institutional coverage the field is small and none of it is self-serve. Kaiko sells tick history back to 2010 the same way — a quote, a contract, and nothing you can buy with a card — and Amberdata is the one that breaks that pattern, with a 600-dollar single-exchange plan you can put on a card and an 18-month cap on order-book history.

If what you need is a price rather than a benchmark, the self-serve half of the category is much cheaper and says what it costs: CoinAPI meters 400-plus venues in credits, CoinGecko API starts at 35 dollars, and neither is pretending to be a reference rate.

For network metrics without the market-data half, Glassnode, CryptoQuant and Santiment publish their prices, which is the whole difference in how you plan for them.